Calm in the Chaos

By Saima Mirza. Saima, 22, lives in New Delhi, India. She is an architecture student at Gurgaon university. Please read her article and leave your thoughts and comments below.

What defines us is how well we rise after falling ….

Hey, My name is Amal. Weird name for you maybe; but it means “Hope.”

I shifted to New York a few years back. Everything about this place intrigued me. The streets, the lights, the sounds. Anything and everything. I had a pretty amazing life I tell you. The energy of this city made me ecstatic.

A job I loved, in the place I loved, with the one I loved. What else did I need?

And yes about him; We got married 2 years back and he is the best husband one could ask for. All my ambitious dreams were coming true. Everything I had planned fell in place perfectly. My imagination of what a perfect life would be had come true.

I know I shouldn’t be feeling this way. There is literally nothing wrong with my life. If you look at me you would think of me as the happiest person there should be. Everything had worked so perfectly well; my family, my career my love even the lovely child I just had . I feel sometimes I am being ungrateful when I feel unhappy about my life. I really don’t understand though what it is and why it is this way.

I feel low so often nowadays. Nothing is wrong though. I don’t understand this. I feel like isolating my self and being quiet. I have become more anxious. I get agitated easily. I can’t sleep at night. I am unable to concentrate on things. I feel restless, in fact I have never been so restless. And most of it all, there is this weird feeling of hopelessness; which is just there, Staring blank at you.

I feel lonely despite all this love around me. I am angry with myself when I try to understand what it is really. Cause I can’t. I can’t give you a reason why I am feeling this low. My husband asks me what is wrong with me lately.

I can’t explain to him what is wrong, cause I myself am unable to comprehend it. I cannot point to you a reason why. There are times when I feel like running away from everyone. I don’t know why I have these thoughts cause I have so many blessings in life. I got promoted last week. It is something I should be happy about. I have always been ambitious and this is what I always wanted. Nothing makes sense to me nowadays. I used to be this happy person, giggling and laughing all the time. Today I am this person, who feels a constant weight of sadness pulling myself down and this sadness is there with no reason for my mind to understand.

I talked to my colleague about it the other day. She told me I am showing sings of depression. I have been thinking about what she said since then. Cause how can I be depressed? Me of all the people. I don’t have a reason to be depressed. This idea of me having depression is so much against what I have always been. I really couldn’t ask for anything else, that is how great my life was supposedly going. Then why am I having these thoughts?

Its like I am sinking and that too in the middle of an ocean, Alone and lonely; And suddenly all goes silent. I sink deeper and deeper and the silence and the darkness consumes me and I am defenceless against it until I lose this battle and lose myself to the darkness.

I never thought of depression as something so serious before. Now that I feel what I am feeling right now I understand its not so black and white. I thought people are depressed, but there is always some loss or something associated with it that is the cause of their depression. Something that triggers it. It is true in many cases.

In my case though there is nothing, no reason and yet I feel so hopeless. Yet I feel alone in this busy New York street whose sounds once used to be melody to my ears.

My life had become a series of routines that I had started to hate. I had started to believe that no one would be able to understand this cause I myself hadn’t understood any of it.

I can tell you one thing. It takes a lot of courage to go up to your loved one and accept this fact that there is something wrong and you need help and you are unable to control, understand, or do anything about it. I gathered that courage and did that one day. Since that day things have changed drastically for me.

I visited a psychiatrist and a counsellor. That is when I got to know how common depression is. I met a women there who just had given birth to a perfectly healthy beautiful baby boy and yet had developed something called postpartum depression. Human mind and how it works is very complex to understand. There are so many things happening in the brain. Otherwise if you look at it , giving birth should have been the happiest thing for a mother but in this case it is making her depressed . Some things are incomprehensible.

After all this. After putting down my defences. After asking for help and actually getting it. I can tell you there is always hope. Hope to change hopelessness.

There was a time when i had no control of my thoughts, I felt worthless, I felt replaceable. That is what depression does to you. It controls your mind. It is very different than sadness. Depression is a disease of the mind and like any other disease this also has a cure and can be treated. Hope is what you have to hold on to .

And yes muster up that courage. Ask for help; cause you are not alone and there is always help. Depression is a war you are fighting and it wants you to feel like you are alone in this and there is no coming out.

But there is light, There is hope and this is definitely not the end.

You don’t say to a person having a physical ailment; Oh you will get over it , you will be fine, then why have we as a society become so insensitive to a disease as severe as depression ?

350 million people worldwide suffer from depression and these are just people who have actually reported depression. There are so many who don’t speak about it . Mental illness as such has not been shown the same alarm as has any other ailment with physical consequences.

This needs to change and their needs to be more awareness regarding mental disorders. We need to normalise it so that a person having such a issue is able to speak up about it and help becomes easier cause it is already hard to have depression and fight it but fighting it alone makes it even more difficult.